A thought here, a picture there, a day together and maybe a run through the woods and a ride across the country with Michael Cook, aka "The Cookie Monster".

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Secret and Kody Have A Home

Secret and Kody have found a new home. A family interested in adopting them and their little sister came forward. This will be a good situation for the kids although they will be living nearly two hours away and in a new school environment. Everything happened very fast. Everybody took a couple visits to get acquainted and then they did an overnight visit. A couple days later Secret and Kody were gone. We are sorry to see them go but had a great time having them with us. We hope they will always look back at our time as a very positive time in their life and we really hope they will stay in touch with us over the upcoming years.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) seems to be the latest buzz for publishing on the web. RSS has been around since the early days of Netscape but I recently heard about the potential on Leo Laporte’s podcast. One morning I was up ‘til 1 AM reading about it and adding some basic RSS functions to my website. All of the sudden a whole new technology opened up to me and I was fascinated with the possibilities. In a very basic nutshell, RSS lets other sites pull information from your site without having to parse HTML. You simply create an XML file containing headlines to your articles/pages, and RSS readers parse the XML data and display it to users. The nice thing about this is that Yahoo delivers RSS feeds to the My Yahoo! home page. So My Yahoo! shows me that latest posting on my website and any other websites that I want to subscribe (sites that support RSS). It’s pretty powerful.

I also discovered podcasts last weekend and am having a great time listening to TWIT (This Week In Tech) on my MP3 player when I’m running. Podcasting is somewhat misleading because you don’t have to be an Ipoder to listen to a Podcast. Since they are in MP3 and/or WMA format, any MP3 player will play the Podcast. No commercials. Some are rather basic and boring but TWIT is very much like listening to a radio show. Very nice. And free.

Enough on the technology front. What else is going on. Lots of work the last few weeks. Many late nights and doing some coding on the weekend and in the car. Last weekend we spent time removing kitchen tile. The kitchen counters are bare and waiting for some new granite. We also planted our first few trees at Manzanita. Next will be the irrigation and fences.

I’m trying to spend more time on the bike but not able to get as much training as needed for my next ride. My Sunday ride ended early after 50 miles due to two flat tires. I have a bad habit of not carrying my pump with me and hoping a couple of air cartridges will get me through any trouble I encounter. Sunday taught me hope is not enough. Nicole has been riding with me on some of my runs. We both love it. She’s learning all my routes and does a great job pacing me. Although for the first time I had a bird nail me with some poop while running under a tree. Not sure if that was good luck or bad?

That’s about it for now. I spending way too much time vacuuming and am researching the Roomba (robotic vacuum) to help with my chores. It seems like these wood floors collect dust like no other before.